The history of art abounds with portraits and statues of great and famous men. They sit on horses as commanders of armies, grasp scepters that symbolize their rule, display laws that testify to their wise governance (for example, Davies Napoleon in his Study). Baker uses none of these conventions. Her headless and faceless figures are not portraits at all, even when they borrow from actual portraits. Instead, Baker represents them as generic men of power, their luxurious suits and expensive ties, ruffled shirtfronts and ceremonial armor more telling than their faces.
Perhaps the most striking features of these drawings—the features that most evoke the feeling of power—are their gigantic scale and blackness, an especially deep blackness that seems to stalk these men of power. It is, in Baker's words, "the void that will suck you in," the "abyss" into which misused and corrupted power falls. Above all, it is this blackness that visually commands the drawings' surfaces, engulfs and flattens volumes, and obliterates contours. The world represented here is less a world of objects in space and more a series of fleeting moments in a fluid, moving field of ominous darkness. In this, the fragility of Baker's medium—charcoal dust on unframed paper—perfectly matches the ephemerality of her subject.
